Exploring nature with your child is largely a matter of becoming receptive to what lies all around you. It is learning again to use your eyes, ears, nostrils and fingertips, opening up the disused channels of sensory perception.

– Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (New York: Harper & Row, 1998 [1965]), p. 52. The book was expanded with photographs from an earlier essay that Carson wrote for Woman’s Home Companion, published in July 1956, “Help Your Child to Wonder.” You can access a PDF of that magazine article here.